FeedJit

Month: July 2014

And I’ve driven all sorts of cars from them. My favorite among all is a BMW X3. That is one sweet vehicle. It has two modes – Eco and Sport. Eco is let’s just say awesome but sport – oh my. All you have to do is touch the accelerator pedal and the car takes off like a rocket.

I’ve gotten to drive two generations of Toyota Prius. The latest is in a word really interesting. It’s one of the more refined hybrid vehicles on the market.

And I note the 4th generation of the Prius gets a lot more right. For example, you can select from four different modes, Eco, Speed, Electric only, and just gasoline only. That’s nice. And I note even if i was on the highway there’s a sweet spot around 70MPH where to keep the car at speed it only uses the electric motor.

I’ve also driven a Mazda 3, Nissan Frontier pickup, Honda Insight, But like I said, my two favorites are the BMW and the Toyota.

Be they developers or systems I.T. folks we’re pretty easy to spot in the wilds.

We tend to favor khakis and polo shirts. The more systems we tend to favor jeans and t-shirts which makes us somewhat harder to spot.

But the dead giveaway – the full backpack. Yup. That and there’s usually an HID tag and an RSA token hanging off their belt.

Me – I go a little of each. Khaki’s, sneakers, polo shirt, but the badges and RSA tokens are safe in the backpack until I get to the office. And on Fridays I go casual – jeans of course. And sometimes a t-shirt. I’m waiting to get my t-shirt that on the front says “Information Science” and on the back says “Because they didn’t offer bad ass motherf___r as a degree.” That’ll be fun to wear.

Now normally the Red Line from Alewife inward gets pretty packed. On one terminus it hits Harvard and then passes through MIT’s campus, Cambridge proper, Mass General, Park St,, Downtown Crossing and then South Station onward to either Ashmont or Braintree from there.

But today was super packed coming home. Normally you’ve got a fair amount of separation between yourself and other passengers. Today though we had about 4 to 6 inches between us. It was tight. To the point where we stop at South Station and I can’t get off the train.

So that’s when the voice comes – and I loudly state “Make a hole please! Let’s move it people!”

I know, I can’t help myself. But sometimes you have to jolt the dolts out of their stupor. And I’m just the guy to do that.

So I’ve now been here by calendar 34 working days. I’m getting a little more responsibility as time goes on. Now that they know I have the chops.

For example – I was asked to identify what ports applications are using on the servers.

Now if you’ve been around networking you know about a utility called netstat.

You just do a :

sudo netstat -A inet -n -p

Ok, lets take it apart piece by piece.

sudo is a way of allowing people to run things at elevated privilege but without having to know the root password for the system. Pretty convenient and you can also tightly control WHO can sudo too but managing group membership.

This blog used to be about fun stuff – you know, stuff like criticizing the church, advocating for marriage equality and gay rights in general.

But the fight has sort of gone out for me. Rhode Island got marriage equality over a year ago. And the fight is now playing out in many states at the federal judiciary level. I put forth that there is now more than enough precedence for this to come before the U.S. Supreme Court again and this time they won’t be able to punt. That would mean equality throughout the U.S. even the recalcitrant south.

But if you note it’s become more techie or geeky lately. If only because I’ve been doing a lot of reading. Things like learning C#, BASH scripting, some javascript and java in there. And so a lot of what I’m either learning or refreshing on gets reflected here.